Writing Analytics

Writing Analytics has recently become a very popular subfield of LA. A number of different tools and approaches are currently being investigated.

  • Tausczik, Y.R., & Pennebaker, J.W. (2010). The psychological meaning of words: LIWC and computerized text analysis methods. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 29, 24-54.
  • Graesser, A., McNamara, D.S., Louwerse, M., & Cai, Z. (2004). Coh-Metrix: Analysis of text on cohesion and language. Behavioral Research Methods, Instruments, and Computers, 36, 193-202.
  • Shum, S. B., Sándor, Á., Goldsmith, R., Wang, X., Bass, R., & McWilliams, M. (2016). Reflecting on reflective writing analytics: Assessment challenges and iterative evaluation of a prototype tool. In Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Learning Analytics & Knowledge (pp. 213-222). ACM.
  • Gibson, A., Kitto, K., & Bruza, P. (2016). Towards the Discovery of Learner Metacognition From Reflective Writing. Journal of Learning Analytics, 3(2), 22-36.
  • Gibson, A., Aitken, A., Sándor, Á., Buckingham Shum, S., Tsingos-Lucas, C., & Knight, S. (2017, March). Reflective writing analytics for actionable feedback. In Proceedings of the Seventh International Learning Analytics & Knowledge Conference (pp. 153-162). ACM.

A number of tools and demos are also available which implement the ideas discussed in these papers. Some of these are proprietary, and so a bit hard to access, but you can increasingly expect to see them rolling out in Learning Management Systems and other tools.